Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan sent shudders through the secular opposition earlier this year when he said his goal was to raise a “religious youth.” Earlier this month, his AK Party sprang the surprise proposal to overhaul the education system.

The self-styled Islamist militant tore a wound in France’s fragile sense of community when he gunned down the soldiers, sons of North African immigrant families like his own, and then a rabbi and three Jewish children - all in the name of al-Qaeda.

The arrests in Toulouse in the southwest, Nantes and Le Mans in western France, and in the Paris region, were carried out by mostly by DCRI domestic intelligence agency, with the national police’s elite RAID unit providing support in some cases